“The mural I’ve painted is a twist on the mythology around Celtic mother goddess Danu, combined with the river Lee running through Cork alongside my piece on Sullivans Quay which reflects the Milky Way on clear nights. I like to think that even today, no matter who you meet or cross paths with on the streets, they could be gods in disguise. These ‘modern classics’ are a lot of fun for me to do as a take on that. The woman I’ve painted is a bit anonymous with just the sliver of her face visible, adding to the notion she could be anyone, passing through the streets of Cork. The stars and galaxies are spinning out of her red hair as a nod to the movement and flow of the river, the heart and soul of Cork City shaping and defining the energy of the city.” KITSUNE JOLENE, courtesy of the ARDÚ Street Art Project.
Home At Last
Greetings from Cork City, Ireland!
When we arrived on the 15th, our main concern was the state of our furniture, which had been in storage for almost a year. We were delighted to find our stuff free of damage, mold and creepy-crawlies; the piano was out of tune, but I expected that. With the help of a few stout Irish lads, we managed to set up our new home in a day and a half. Dad did a great job turning the cottage into something closer to a house, giving each of us a small den for alone time and (knowing our sexual proclivities), a big fucking bedroom cleverly designed so that any visitor would find it difficult to discern our kinky orientation.
We’re about a kilometer from the city center, close enough to walk if we feel like shopping or experiencing the nightlife. Once there, we can take a short bus ride from the city center to the train station if we want to explore the country. We sold our car when we left Nice and have no intention of buying another, in part because we have no experience in left-side driving, but largely because the Irish are terrible drivers. I can’t remember a day in the last six months when there wasn’t a headline about a fatal car accident in either the Irish Examiner (Cork) or the Irish Times (Dublin). One recent report attributed the spate of car accidents to distracted drivers watching Netflix. What the fuck, people?
Road dangers aside, I love the vibes here—much more positive in comparison to France. Bitching has always been the French national pastime, and they even came up with a flexible verb (“râler”) that covers all forms of bitching: complaining, whining, moaning, groaning, grumbling and criticizing. The French râler even when there’s nothing to râler about, and now that they have plenty to râler about, it gets on one’s nerves after a while. In all fairness, the tendency to engage in râler has a positive pole: the French have high standards when it comes to food, wine and culture. Lucky for me, I’ll be traveling to Paris at least once a month, so I can enjoy the good things without getting caught up in the negativity.
In the latest survey of Happiest Countries in the World, Ireland is #17 and France is #27. Hooray for me! I’ve gained ten points on the happiness scale!
Unwelcome Validation
One of my friends in Seattle subscribes to The Atlantic, and occasionally she sends me articles likely to pique my interest. Her latest gift was a piece by Spencer Kornhaber titled, “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” I should note that the author would answer that question in the negative, but the evidence he offers is weak at best. Hip-hop mingling with electronic music is hardly an innovation. Like all critics, he wants to live in an era of cultural excellence, but he tries too hard to make something out of nothing.
The article covers most of the arts, but much of the narrative focuses on music. The first person Kornhaber spoke with was Ted Gioia, the great jazz critic and musical historian:
America’s “creative energy” has been sapped, he told me, and the results can be seen in the diminished quality of arts and entertainment, with knock-on effects to the country’s happiness and even its political stability.
He’s not alone in fearing that we’ve entered a cultural dark age. According to a recent YouGov poll, Americans rate the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. A 2023 story in The New York Times Magazine declared that we’re in the “least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” An art critic for The Guardian recently proclaimed that “the avant-garde is dead.”
The chaos of TikTok, the disruption of the pandemic, and the threat of AI have destabilized any coherent story of progress driving the arts forward. In its place, a narrative of decay has taken hold, evangelized by critics such as Gioia. They’re citing very real problems: Hollywood’s regurgitation of intellectual property; partisan culture wars hijacking actual culture; unsustainable economic conditions for artists; the addicting, distracting effects of modern technology.
“Music is turning into a rights-management business,” Gioia said. “There are vested interests now that don’t want new music to flourish. The private-equity funds just want you to listen to the same songs over and over again, because they own them.” The ultimate effect, he thinks, is to discourage true, daring artistry. If Bach were alive today, “he’d spend a few weeks trying to break into the L.A. music scene and say, ‘Ah, I’ll be a hedge-fund manager instead.’”
The same YouGov survey that found Americans to be so unhappy with the state of movies, TV, and music found that people also generally feel that this is the decade with the worst economy, the least moral society, the least close-knit communities, and the most political division.
Kornhaber also spoke with indie musician Jaime Brooks to get her take on the situation:
Best-known for her work under the aliases Elite Gymnastics and Default Genders, Brooks has long been a “bedroom musician”: someone who uses a home computer to make high-quality recordings. In the early 2010s, as a 20-something immersed in the hipster party scene in Minneapolis, Brooks collaborated with a friend to release a few ethereal dance songs that drew the acclaim of music bloggers. She was soon dating the similarly buzzy artist Grimes and living in Los Angeles, getting a close-up look at the modern pop ecosystem.
But these days, her mics and guitar are packed up in boxes, gathering dust. Spending time working on new songs just doesn’t feel right given her belief, articulated in widely circulated tweets and essays, that the music industry is doomed. Like Gioia, Brooks feels that tech and business interests are strangling the arts; like (art critic) Dean Kissick, she believes that most of the new work that gets made today just flat-out isn’t good. But Brooks’s view is even darker than either of theirs, and more explicitly personal. She described the future of music to me in one word: wreckage.
Many musicians believe that Spotify’s business model is predatory, forcing artists to participate in a system in which they make only a fraction of a penny whenever a song is played. Brooks agrees, but her concern runs deeper than the money itself; she argues that music’s role in society has been corrupted. Streaming encourages artists to play an enervating game of scale: The more songs they release, the more chance they have of going viral and turning pittances into real income. Artists are thus motivated to record as quickly and cheaply as possible. All of this, Brooks believes, has led to a glut of music—both popular and obscure—that is plainly bad: less distinct, less soulful, and less skillfully made than the minimal standards of previous eras. “Nobody can get the resources to develop their craft,” she said.
This decline in quality has created the conditions for what Brooks fears will come next: a flood of AI-generated songs that further devalue music as an art form and an economic enterprise. Already, streaming platforms have inculcated a huge demand for “utility” music, such as white noise to fall asleep to and “chill beats” to study to. Cheap AI tools can now conjure credible versions of such music, and over time they’ll only get better at imitating other styles. Listeners’ standards have become so diminished that they won’t be able to tell the difference.
I covered these issues in the Chick Riffs, “The De-Evolution of Modern Music” and “AI Resistance Via Live at the BBC.” No, I don’t deserve a pat on the back, and while it’s nice to know that I’m not an out-of-touch loony, the decline of the arts is nothing to celebrate.
The views expressed by Gioia and Brooks do explain my decision to explore the music of yesteryear (when innovation was celebrated) and wait three years after release to review any contemporary album. My primary goal is to discover music that qualifies as timeless or represents a significant step forward in music history, and I’ve learned not to count on 21st-century music to provide timeless music or much in the way of innovations that advance the art. When people talk about innovation in music today, they mostly talk about technological innovation and ignore the importance of craftsmanship.
The good news is that most Americans think their movies, TV and music suck, which suggests they are open to something better. The bad news is that when you combine the decline in artistic quality and innovation in the USA with the Trump/GOP attack on “left-wing” artistic expression, it’s more likely that American creators will double down on playing it safe. Because Americans are fundamentally miserable, you can expect more dreary apocalyptic movies, dark comedies and plenty of blood, guts, guns and gore—and a whole lot of repetitive music.
Kornhaber’s USA-centric orientation assumes that the United States remains the center of the artistic universe. Given America’s declining influence in nearly every field—science, education, economics, diplomacy and the arts—such a perspective is painfully out of date. Since Europe also suffers from Spotification and the branding fetish, if innovation grounded in craftsmanship is going to make a comeback, it’s far more likely to emerge elsewhere, hopefully from one of the Trump-tagged “shithole countries” where musicians don’t have skin in the industry game and couldn’t care less about their “brand.”
The Genius Challenge
While we’re on the subject of innovation . . .
When I finally had time to come up with a review schedule, I decided I would do Thelonious Monk first and Ray Charles second. It was only later that I realized I had placed two musicians commonly tagged with the “genius” label back to back. As I find the label problematic on many levels, I thought it best to lay out my concerns before publishing those reviews.
The term “genius” has been freely and inaccurately applied to many musicians by critics who have trouble controlling their emotions or are determined to increase readership by kowtowing to a popular artist’s fan base. Hence Rolling Stone titled one of their issues “The Genius of Eminem,” whose simple and repetitive rhyming hardly places him in the same tier with Keats, Yeats or Emily Dickinson. Kanye West is considered a genius for two reasons: one, he told everybody he was a genius; and two, he used samples from the works of other artists in clever ways. Sorry, Ye, but putting together a musical jigsaw puzzle from other people’s work doesn’t qualify you as a genius . . . but you might qualify based on the common perception that most geniuses are first-rate assholes.
The genius tag was first attached to Monk and Ray by their respective record companies. Blue Note released two Monk compilation albums titled “Genius of Modern Music, Vols. One & Two.” Atlantic Records went even further for Ray, with three albums bearing the g-word in their titles. ABC followed the pattern with Ray’s first album with the label, titling the effort as The Genius Hits the Road. If you advertise the same message over and over again, some people will accept it as the truth and pass it on to others: “Yes, tests show Tide is better than Cheer.”
There is no universally acceptable criteria that determine whether or not someone is a genius. Some define genius as exceptional intelligence, i.e., having a high IQ. Others define it as a combination of originality, unbridled curiosity, and the ability to approach challenges in novel ways, in defiance of expectations and norms. Author Walter Isaacson, who has written several books about geniuses (including Elon Musk, confirming the genius = first-rate asshole hypothesis), wrote a piece for Time where he argued that “Being a genius is different than merely being supersmart. Smart people are a dime a dozen, and many of them don’t amount to much. What matters is creativity, the ability to apply imagination to almost any situation.”
So . . . do we believe Ray Charles and Thelonious Monk were geniuses because they were promoted as such, or because they possessed the ability to apply imagination to almost any situation? Let’s see what the artists had to say.
Ray found the label somewhat intimidating, as described in his autobiography, Brother Ray: “. . . it was the boys at Atlantic who started using the genius label. It wasn’t my idea. Calling someone a genius is some heavy shit, and I’d never have used the word in regard to myself. I think I’m pretty good at what I do, but I’ve never considered myself a genius. Yet between Atlantic and the public, the name stuck—that and Brother Ray. I saw it as a high compliment, and I certainly didn’t complain. If the public accepted that, fine. On the other hand, I tried very hard not to let myself feel pressure; I didn’t want to feel compelled to live up to the name. And I haven’t thought of myself as a genius before or since.”
Unsurprisingly, Monk took a more philosophical approach in the handwritten pages of “Monk’s Advice.” “Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along + do it. A genius is the one most like himself.” Monk believed that achieving a genius-level state involved a journey of self-realization, and I think Ray would have agreed with him.
There’s no question that Monk was the more innovative pianist and composer. Still, few vocalists could match Ray Charles when it came to evoking a deeply emotional response from his listening audience. Given the degradation of the term, I’m uncomfortable pronouncing anyone a genius, but I will say that both Thelonious Monk and Ray Charles were two of the most influential and innovative artists in music history, and I won’t argue with anyone who believes they deserved the genius appellation.
Oh! One more thing—I’ve updated my bio to reflect recent developments and life changes.
Cheers!